Discovering progressive, nondual, or unitive Christianity/spirituality can be a welcome liberation from past religious traditions and beliefs. But there can also be some difficult adjustments if you had a strong involvement in that previous tradition. Recently, I was asked to write about prayer, which is a longstanding practice for many Christians. Can a nondual Christian still pray?

Many of my recent posts deal with topics that at least touch on this question. Two I would recommend are “When the Floodgates Won’t Close” from last summer and is a response to the tragic Texas floods. And the second is “Going Out of Your Mind” on the subject of meditation. But to cut to the chase, the biggest challenge to prayer as it’s traditionally understood is the end of the theistic God, of God as a personal being somewhere out there, who listens to us and “answers” our prayers.

This is the God the 19^th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was referring to when he said, “God is dead, and we have killed him.” And “we” is simply modern, scientific culture. In our understanding of the universe today, there is no place (i.e. heaven) for a divine being and there is no need for one as an explanation of how the universe works.

This, of course, was not the case in the ancient and medieval worlds. For people of those times, God was the one who made the world and kept it going. Prayer was typically understood as an appeal to God (or one of the pagan gods or one of the Christian saints) to make something happen or to stop something happening. This could be something personal, like healing or finding a lost cow, or communal, like protecting the country from an enemy army or relief from a drought.

There really was no limit to the things one could pray for, and there were no limits to theories about how to make prayers effective, or which god or saint one should pray to for various needs. Premodern cosmology made such prayer “reasonable” because heaven, the home of God and other divine beings, had a real location, just beyond the boundary of the relatively small universe. In addition, these entities were thought to be regular visitors to this world, in various guises and in various places (temples, sacred rivers, holy mountain tops, etc.).

The formation of a scientific universe swept all that divine literalism away—in theory. In practice, however, prayer continues and belief in God as a divine being (and perhaps in other spiritual entities) continues. Though a precocious adolescent, I still felt God’s “presence” in my life (sometimes uncomfortably so), experienced especially in the words of the Bible.

But more education and adult living made such a God increasingly unbelievable. Finally, one stick too many got pulled out of my religious Jenga tower and down it came. Yet something remained. Call it “faith” if you like, but giving it a name wasn’t really helpful. In any case, my spiritual journey since then has basically been to figure out what that “it” is and what it means, not so much intellectually but in the experience of living.

One of the most important things I have learned is that while Nietzsche’s declaration was unique for the time (and outrageous to many), his basic idea wasn’t original. One can find disbelief in a divine being among ancient Greek philosophers (which supposedly got Socrates killed) and at least deep skepticism among many sages of east and south Asian religious and spiritual traditions. And if you pay attention, you will even find passages in the Old Testament wisdom books which at least raise an eyebrow.

But within Christianity, the trailblazers on this subject were (and continue to be) the mystics. The earliest were those repelled by the increasing resemblance between the church’s God the Father and the Roman emperor. This and other things moved them into seclusion, initially in the wilderness and then into monasteries and other religious communities.

Mystics encountered God primarily, not in elaborate worship or shrines, but in the seclusion of their cells. Their most profound prayers were not with words but in silence. God was not in heaven but in their hearts and in the natural world all around them. They lived out Paul’s declaration in Acts, that God is the one in whom “we live and move and have our being.”

For the mystics, spirituality and psychology became two sides of the same coin: the wonder and mystery of their own existence. God as Spirit was, in reality, their innermost being. In the paradoxical wisdom of Augustine, “God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.” And in a remarkable prayer (never taken seriously by the church) in John’s account of the Last Supper, Jesus asks that God become one with his followers just as God is one with him.

Thus, while never embraced by the church, the idea of divine union has been present within Christianity from the beginning. It’s the essence of what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God. The greatest mystic of the Middle Ages, if not of all time, was the theologian Meister Eckhart. Unlike most, he did go public with his beliefs, and not without peril to himself and his career. It was Eckhart who made perhaps the most profound yet concise statement of the experience of divine union.

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

“Eye” is a metaphor for our consciousness, our faculty of awareness, by which we know all our sense perceptions, our emotions, and our thoughts. It is our most fundamental self and it is, says Eckhart and countless mystics of all traditions, where our self and God’s Self join as one Spirit.

Where the problems occur is in identifying ourselves with all the sensations which constantly wash over us, including and especially the voices in our head. Recognizing this, it is no surprise then that Eckhart would declare, “Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.” For it is in inner silence that we find both our true self and the divine Self with which we are united and who is our eternal Source.

There is nothing wrong with prayers of intercession (for others) or petition (for ourselves). They may arise out of genuine compassion for others or our own need or even distress. They reflect our state of being at the moment. But they also reflect our feeling of God’s distance and separation, which is always an illusion.

This is why meditation, or contemplative prayer, is the foundation of unitive spirituality. By sitting in silence, we allow the cacophony of feelings and voices to recede and gradually lose their power over us. In doing so, we rediscover the stillness where we and God come together, where we are, in fact, “one eye” as Eckhart says, one true Self.

There are countless guide books, both ancient and modern, to the contemplative life. I won’t go into methods or guidelines here, except to say that, as with much of life, less is more. In other words, keep it simple. Recently, Pope Leo was asked if there was a book that provided insight into who he was and he recommended the brief devotional classic, The Practice of the Presence of God, the collected spiritual wisdom of the 17^th century French monk, Brother Lawrence. That’s the direction in which you want to go.

The problem with much traditional prayer is that its aim is to change God’s mind, so God will do what we want. The goal of meditation or contemplation is to change our mind, or at least the role the mind plays in our life. To put it in its proper place, as a tool rather than the one in charge. Then we will know our true identity as Spirit, in biblical terms, or as simple awareness and consciousness, in more modern-day language.

In any case, we then can experience life, not as a contest with seemingly impossible rules and demands, but as pure opportunity and our greatest gift. It is for this reason that, in perhaps his most famous quote, Meister Eckhart said, “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘Thank you,’ that would be enough.”

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